How To Read a Poem

No one type of literature seems to fail so often with students as does poetry. By the time most students reach high school, the mere mention of the word will elicit audible groans. From my observation over the years, the blame seems to lie in three places: with students, with poetry, and with teachers. Students are often lazy, uninterested, or uncomfortable and do not want to tackle anything that seems hard or different; poetry, by definition, is "difficult"; and teachers often forget these two facts, continuing to teach as if there is no problem. Part of the solution might lie in re-training ourselves to "read" poetry; we have to understand the base-level concrete meaning of the poem before we can proceed to interpretation of meaning and symbolism. The single biggest mistake I see students repeat over and over is moving too quickly to interpret a poem before they have experienced it fully. Just as we would never immediately attempt to decide what a painting means before enjoying its color, composition, and subject matter, we should never interpret a poem before reading it carefully on a number of levels: sound, rhythm, meter, form, concrete meaning, connotative meaning, imagery, and figurative language. Understanding poetry is difficult, because poetry is difficult. But I believe poetry is worth the extra trouble it takes, even if that means relearning how to read. If you will follow these steps, I think you will ultimately come to a better understanding and appreciation of poetry, which will open up for you a whole world of beautiful, inspiring, and meaningful art. And even if you don’t truly enjoy poetry, you will become a better reader and interpreter in general, not only of written works, but also of yourself and the people and world around you. The steps:

1. Read the poem aloud. Don’t worry about meaning, symbolism, figures of speech, and so on. If you find yourself asking what the poem means, don’t answer that question. Just listen to the poem the way you would a song you hear on the radio for the first time; listen for a general sense of beat, rhythm, sound, and mood. Try to follow the cues of the poem so you can read it well: pause at commas, periods, and other marks of punctuation, both within lines and at the end of lines; if there’s no punctuation at the end of a line (if the line is enjambed, not end-stopped), make just the very slightest of pauses, then read on. What initial feelings do you have after reading the poem?

2. Read the poem again, aloud, but this time pay very careful attention to specific sounds and rhythms. Note lines that draw your attention, lines that strike you as good or interesting in their sound, then try to figure out why. Note uses of sound—alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and so on—and think about the way these make you feel and what they make you think of. How do the rhythms make you feel, and what do they make you think of?

3. Read the poem again, slowly, a line or two at a time, trying to figure out the concrete meaning of the lines. This is the most important step in reading a poem; remember that you are trying to figure out the concrete, literal meaning of the poem, not to figure out what the poem means. If at any time you find yourself thinking about symbolism or deeper meaning, stop and concentrate on concrete meaning. First, look at the title, thinking about what it might mean. Then try to answer two very important questions: who is the speaker and what is the situation? (If you can’t answer those questions now, try to answer them at the end of this step.) As you read the poem line by line, paraphrase, either out loud or in writing. Put the poem into your own words; your paraphrase should be at least as long as the poem, but it will probably be longer. Look up any unfamiliar words, or any words that seem strange in the context. Try to figure out the poem’s "plot." Pay careful attention to lines with inverted word order. See in your mind the picture or succession of pictures the poem paints; it may even help to draw the poem as a series of pictures, as a cartoon. This step should involve more of your time than any other. (Interestingly, this is the step that most of us have skipped through quickly in the past, and when students jump to "wrong" readings of the poem, it’s usually because they have not done this step thoroughly and carefully.)

4. Scan the poem for various figures of speech, noting how the metaphors, similes, personification, and so on change the literal meaning. Consider not only the denotation of words, but also the connotation. Poets are very economical with words; they like to make a word carry as many levels of meaning as possible, and they like to use loaded, powerful language. See if you unpack these loaded words, especially nouns and verbs.

5. Look over the poem and try to figure out its structural elements. Are there units of thought? What effect do the stanzas or other divisions of the poem have on its meaning? Is there a rhyme scheme? How does it work and what is its effect? Is the poem written in free verse? How do line lengths, rhythm, and sound affect the meaning?

What is the meter and its effect? Does the poem fall into any of the familiar poetic forms (sonnet, villanelle, terza rima, ballad, and so on)? So what?

6. What do you know about the poet? When was the poem written? How might it relate to historical events of its time? Of our time? What issues does the poem raise?

7. Now, finally, you are ready to answer the question you have been wanting to ask from the beginning: what does the poem mean? What is the poet trying to say about the subject, about human nature, about the world? With everything you have discovered in mind, reconsider the poem’s literal meaning and look for possible symbolic readings that might spring from the literal. Does the concrete meaning support these more abstract meanings?

8. How does the poem’s subject and meaning relate to your experience? Do you agree with the poem, or does something in your experience make you think otherwise?

9. Read the entire poem again, aloud, paying careful attention to pauses, in order to put the poem back together after all this tearing apart. Let all you have learned and felt and thought about the poem enter into your reading this final time.

These steps will allow you to read a poem with more understanding and deeper appreciation. When you are able to do that, you are on your way to becoming a skillful reader of poetry. You may find that you can read a particular poem for a whole lifetime and still discover additional meaning every time. That’s partly because poetry is so dense that it contains more meaning than we can figure out at once, but also because you will change as time passes, thus changing what the poem means to you. Learning how to read a poem will not only help you in literature class, but will also make you a more learned, well-rounded person, and self-aware person.